#d. nurske

[soulmaking]

[headlightsforever]

D. Nurske, “The Dim Tenements” from Poetry Magazine, May 2023

[aaknopf]

Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult is D. Nurkse's retelling of a love story that reverberates through the centuries. In Nurkse's version, we hear from a number of the players in this tale—the servant, the horse, the dog, the leper—but Tristan is our most frequent guide through its thickets of romance, pain, and narrative possibility. Here he conjures the wood of Morois, where he lived in hiding with his love.

Morois

Starving, we found one blackberry. Since I picked it, I whispered, you eat it. But I saw it first, she said, so it's yours.

I kissed her and pressed the globule with my tongue into her mouth. Her tongue stopped me. She was shaking.

Was it sweet, I asked. You swallowed it, she said.

*

Morois: wilderness like any other except the maple seeds whirl faster, eager to fall.

We were alone. What did I expect? Only the horse stared lugubriously and turned his solemn rump.

Venus throbbed like a spider bite. Saturn towered over Gorre.

Already she had gathered thread—roots and floricane, leery of the yellow stems that Satan pissed on. Was she Majesty, or just an Irish farm girl?

The nightingale sang with his chest pressed against a thorn, artfully wounded, practicing to pour his heart out to no one.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Love in the Last Days by D. Nurkse.

Browse other books by D. Nurkse.

See D. Nurkse read from his work at BookCulture in New York on April 13 and the Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival on April 22.

[bonesoflumiere]

“… so we blessed each other in a language we invented, more silent than thought, each word backlit as in a dream.”

— D. Nurske, from section I of “A Couple in Garden City,” The Fall: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)

[soulmaking]

[girlmixedupwithstreet]

My father waved good-bye. I didn't wave back, scared I might drop my new cold smoky marble. At the core a spiral glinted and coiled like a small windy flame turning in on itself. That night my mother shook me from a dream, whispering he was dead, he was dead, he was dead, as if to teach a language and I answered: he is dead. Even in sleep my hands had not opened.

D. Nurske, Cat's Eye

[binder0]

The Simulacra

 They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married,

sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a fingernail

gingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roads

marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,

or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.

Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old,

the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,

they made it. Small towns flew past, Rodez, Albi,

limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racing

after hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered,

infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops

darning gray veils - and who were we, watching?

Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field

where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness

of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,

how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

 ~D. Nurske

[aaknopf]

D. Nurske's poetic tour of Brooklyn. [via Fodor's]

A Night in Brooklyn: Poems is now available.